China has established a national agency to boost efforts aimed at tackling the growing threat that space junk poses to its space programs.
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The new organization was formed by China’s space agency, known as the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government research body. It is to research space debris, including non-functional spacecraft, abandoned parts of launch vehicles and other debris.
Xu Dazhe, director of the space agency, said the body will study, track and maneuver debris to protect the country’s space endeavors. It is also intended to make better use of the CAS’s observatories, which can be used to monitor space trash.
In 2003, China became the third country, after Russia and the U.S., to put a man into space. It says it wants to launch a space lab from 2020 to 2022; make manned voyages to the Moon by 2030; and send an unmanned craft to explore Mars no earlier than 2020, after a failed attempt in 2013.
A potential risk to those plans is a large amount of garbage floating around Earth. The U.S. space agency NASA estimates 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball are orbiting Earth. They travel at speeds of up to 7,800 meters per second, fast enough to damage a satellite or spacecraft. When China fired a test missile at an old weather satellite in 2007, it created more than 3,000 piece of debris, NASA said.
China started tracking and studying space garbage under a plan put in place in 2000. That plan has seen its scientists take abandoned satellites off their orbits to pave the way for more launches, state media has said.
The country has launched 129 vehicles into orbit, including manned spacecraft and telecom satellites. Scientists say that debris comes within 100 meters of spacecraft or satellites an average of 30 times per year. They also warn that some of the floating garbage could reenter Earth’s atmosphere, potentially doing harm on the ground. ■